Asking about the "natural" interpretation of these sentences in isolation is not good practice. (But common in Linguistics research.)
1. Yes, the narrow reading is much more natural. Possibly a structural default. But obviously from context it would be physically impossible for a single statue to be simultaneously in many places at once, so only an incredibly weird building with only adjacent corners and a statue sticking through the walls would permit the wide scope. So that is "natural".
2. Probably
because of priming the narrow scope reading was default for me here. Or maybe it's also a structural default. But that meaning is not so pragmatically relevant-- of course there is
at least one book in a library, or it's not a library. So based on, e.g., relevance/informativeness, I would assume you'd say "many books" for that sort of reading, that than the implication of "
only one book"-- this is a scalar implicature. Therefore, the reading I'd probably end up on would be the one where one particular book (e.g., wide scope) is found in each library (Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet or whatever).
That is, syntax give the choices from which semantics pick the most apt meaning.
Well, yes, but better:
Parsing linear sequences of words in an utterance via syntax involves choices based on pragmatics to pick the most apt semantics.
(Of course it might instead be that there are simply multiple different meanings activated or at least available and then we pick one. That's a question for psycholinguistics though.)